2018Q3 Reports: SIGPARSE

SIGPARSE is ACL's special interest group on natural language parsing. The main purposes of the SIG are: to promote interest in the parsing of natural languages; to provide a means of disseminating information about natural language parsing; to ensure the continuity of the biennial 'International Conferences on Parsing Technologies' (IWPT); and to endorse relevant meetings and workshops, such as SPMRL (Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages).

The last IWPT (15th in the serie) was successfully held on Pisa, Italy (September 20-22, 2017), in conjunction with DepLing (http://depling.org) and the EPE shared task (Extrinsic Parser Evaluation, http://epe.nlpl.eu). The local arrangements committee was handled by the University of Pisa and ILC-CNR, by Giuseppe Attardi, Felice Dell’Orletta, Alessandro Lenci, Simonetta Montemagni, and Maria Simi. Kenji Sagae (UC Davis, USA) was general chair for the conference and Yusuke Miyao (National Institute of Informatics, Japan) was program chair.

The next edition of IWPT will take place in 2019.

The current SIGPARSE officers are:

• Eric Villemonte de la Clergerie (INRIA, President)
• Stephan Oepen (Univ. of Oslo, Secretary)
• Yuji Matsumoto (NAIST - Information Officer),
• Kenji Sagae (USC - Information Officer)
• Anders Søgaard (Univ. Copenhagen - Information Officer).

The next election should be organized in January 2019.

SIGPARSE maintains a website (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./sigparse/) that contains information about the SIG, upcoming activities, and instructions for joining the membership and the mailing list. There are 256 members of SIGPARSE. Membership count is based on the sigparse mailing list, which automatically purges invalid addresses, and to which anyone is free to subscribe.